There’s a condition I see in almost every company where leadership treats IT as a cost center. I call it Battered Budget Syndrome (BBS)—and if your organization has an internal IT person who reports to a CFO or a finance-minded executive, there’s a good chance they’re suffering from it right now.

Here’s how it works. Year after year, the IT person walks into budget meetings and gets told the same thing: cut costs. Find a cheaper option. Do more with less. After enough rounds of this, something breaks—not a server, but the person. They stop advocating for what the business actually needs. They stop bringing solutions to the table. They’ve been conditioned to believe that the only proposals that will survive are the ones that cost the least, so that’s all they bring.

An IT professional with BBS only speaks up when something is on fire. They’ve learned that leadership doesn’t want to hear about proactive improvements, so they wait for emergencies. That means you’re always reacting and never getting ahead.

They also cut corners on implementation. Proper hardening, testing, and security configurations get skipped, not because they don’t know better, but because they’ve never been given the budget to do it right. When a problem needs solving, they reach for free or open-source tools. On paper, the cash outlay is small. In reality, the total cost of ownership is often higher because those tools demand more time, more workarounds, and more manual effort to maintain.

BBS doesn’t save you money. It creates an environment where your technology is held together with duct tape and good intentions. Security gaps widen, and risk for failure increases. And the IT person you’re relying on for strategic guidance has been trained to think small.

If this sounds familiar, the fix doesn’t start with your IT team. It starts with how leadership frames the conversation. Stop asking “how do we spend less on IT?” and start asking “what does our business need technology to do for us?”

Durable businesses NEED an empowered and supportive IT leader that advises best practices and helps your company manage risk. If you’re concerned that your IT team isn’t advising you on the real risks, let my team do a full assessment and help you expose your gaps.

Until next week,

—Jared 

Text Me: 314.806.3912

If you’re a decision maker at your company, you need to be on the bleeding edge of, well, everything. But before you go signing up for seminars, conferences, lunch ‘n learns, and all that jazz, just know there’s a far better (and simpler) way: Subscribing to The Deep View.

This daily newsletter condenses everything you need to know about the latest and greatest AI developments into a 5-minute read. Squeeze it into your morning coffee break and before you know it, you’ll be an expert too.

Subscribe right here. It’s totally free, wildly informative, and trusted by 600,000+ readers at Google, Meta, Microsoft, and beyond.